Abstract

Why a species as successful as Homo sapiens should spend so much time in fiction, in telling one another stories that neither side believes, at first seems an evolutionary
riddle. Because of the advantages of tracking and recombining true information, capacities for event comprehension, memory,
imagination, and communication evolved in a range of animal species—yet even chimpanzees cannot communicate beyond the here
and now. By Homo erectus, our forebears had reached an increasing dependence on one another, not least in sharing information in mimetic, prelinguistic
ways. As Daniel Dor shows, the pressure to pool ever more information, even beyond currently shared experience, led to the
invention of language. Language in turn swiftly unlocked efficient forms of narrative, allowing early humans to learn much
more about their kind than they could experience at first hand, so that they could cooperate and compete better through understanding
one another more fully. This changed the payoff of sociality for individuals and groups. But true narrative was still limited
to what had already happened. Once the strong existing predisposition to play combined with existing capacities for event
comprehension, memory, imagination, language, and narrative, we could begin to invent fiction, and to explore the full range
of human possibilities in concentrated, engaging, memorable forms. First language, then narrative, then fiction, created niches
that altered selection pressures, and made us ever more deeply dependent on knowing more about our kind and our risks and
opportunities than we could discover through direct experience.

Lyn, H, Greenfield, P, Rumbaugh, S. The development of representational play in chimpanzees and bonobos: evolutionary implications, pretense, and the role of interspecies communication. Cogn Dev 2006, 21:199–213.

Bateson, G. %22A theory of play and fantasy%22. In: Bateson, G, ed. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. New York: Chandler; 1972, 177–193.